Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Libby never once mentioned Pirate Jenny. Marc paid the bill.

  Soon after, it was his turn to go to Paris, this time with my letters of recommendation.

  August 6, 1959 Dear Ned: It was a glorious trip, from all points of view—including amours and the business aspect. And I want to thank you for your letters—although I never got to use the Auric or the Veyron-Lacroix; and Marie-Laure, after a series of contretemps, wired me to come see her in Hyères, which I couldn’t.… I’ve tried to reach you by ’phone; now Golde tells me you are in Wis. I have decided to accept the song-cycle commission from Alice Esty (who tells me your Roethke songs are nearly finished, you dog); and it is in line with that that I write you now.… Did you make some kind of deal with Roethke regarding the commission? and if so, what? Do you mind telling me? I want to do the right thing; at the same time I am puzzled as to how to share the commission with the poet (of existing poems), if at all. So do write me here, outlining your own procedure in the matter. And love. Marc.

  Alice Esty, an adventuresome soprano, commissioned, between 1959 and 1966, three composers a year to write cycles for her, starting with Marc, me, and Virgil T. My cycle was on poems of Theodore Roethke, who sent me several lively letters, not at all about esthetics, but setting forth in canny paragraphs exactly what he wanted in residuals, and asking for equal billing on the printed score. (We met only once, not at the concert where the songs were premiered but at the party afterward, where he showed up drunk.) I don’t know what kind of “deal” Marc finally made with his poet, E. E. Cummings, but his group of seven songs, From Marian’s Book, is, for my metabolism, his very best work. Just as Tennessee Williams’s best stories are better than his best plays, precisely because he knows that those stories will never be known by the vast philistine matinee public and can thus be impuniously as convoluted and intimate as he feels, so Marc’s concert songs do not, by definition, pander to the big audience. Not that such pandering is in itself wrong; only when an intellectual aims for the hoi polloi. Marc was an intellectual where Lenny Bernstein was not (although he tried to be and was, in fact, smarter than many an intellectual). Lenny, like Poulenc, wrote the same kind of music for his sacred as for his profane works; Marc tempered his language according to whom he was addressing.

  February 24, 1960 Dear Ned: A sweet wire, for which I thank you. I feel badly that our rehearsals didn’t allow me to get to your concert … I have just come from Carnegie Hall, where Poulenc stubbed his toe flatly in “La Voix Humaine.” A comic “camp” is bearable; a serious “camp” is utterly phony. Love. Marc.

  Clearly Marc was on the German side of my universal spectrum. Morris Golde had, as with Virgil, become closer to Marc than I was on a purely social level, offering no tension or rivalry but being that ideal fan, the Maecenas désintéressé. Morris was—is—a go-between, and very useful when I got involved with the Brecht-Weill estate.

  June 29, 1960 Dear Ned: How good to hear from you. The name Yaddo awoke all sorts of fine memories. Do give my warmest to Elizabeth [Ames] and any others who remember me.… “Jasager” is a beautiful piece. As to copies of the piano-vocal score: I’m sure Lehman Engel must have at least one. He did it way back in the thirties, with the Henry Street Settlement chorus, I think; and I seem to remember it was in English, so he …

  … Incidentally, what about the Brecht estate? They’ll raise a fit if it’s known that an “unauthorized” translation has been made and used, even if noncommercially. Lenya, I have found to my sorrow, isn’t enough when it’s a Brecht-Weill work.…

  I had Shirley Rhoads to my place for a swim yesterday. She is fine, still living (according to her) in a dump, this time in Lobsterville on the other end of this divine island. Maybe sometime in August you’d like to come visit me for a couple of days? Although I warn you I’ll be lousy company; all work and swimming, that’s me this summer. The opera is hard, hard. I do nearly twelve hours a day. I suppose I’ll look back on this period of struggle with love and envy. All affection.

  That would have been mailed to Yaddo. The opera he speaks of was the uncompleted Sacco and Vanzetti. References to Kurt Weill’s Der Jasager concerned my project of producing it at the University of Buffalo. This I eventually did, with my own translation, and with nobody’s permission.

  Two years later it was Marc who was in Yaddo, I in New York. I planned in February to come to Yaddo, which would have meant my taking over Marc’s room there, but changed my mind, remaining in the city instead to rehearse for another of the American song concerts with Bill Flanagan. From Yaddo, then, came this postcard, the last written communication I had from Marc.

  Feb. 22, 1962 Dear Ned: Thanks for the aviso. I shall probably stay on, as Elizabeth has asked me to. But I must come into town for some days: probably around March 18-19. Will you be seeable? Work goes fine, if slowly. I wish I could come to your concert, no soap. I enjoyed the leaflet—but I wish you and Bill would stop those arty-arty Harper’s Bazaar photos. Still, it’s your face, and a beauty too. My love to Bill and you. Marc.

  I have no copies of any letters I may have sent to Marc. But before he left for Martinique I made this entry in my diary:

  3 October 1963. Last night the Rémys came to dine, with Shirley and Marc Blitzstein. Marc gets pugnacious after two drinks, interpreting virtually any remark by anyone as either approbation of or a threat to some dream version of the Common Man who hasn’t existed in thirty years. But the Rémys were bewitched, having never encountered this particular breed of American, probably because Marc is a breed of one, who, like John Latouche in the old days, when on his best behavior, is the most irresistibly quick man in the world.

  I never saw him again. Three weeks later he left for Fort-de-France in Martinique, and eleven weeks after that he was dead. On 22 January 1964, the world received the news, via The New York Times front page, announced as an auto accident. Next day it was learned he had been set upon by three Portuguese sailors who, with drunken promises of sex, lured him into an alley where they left him moneyless, naked, battered, and screaming.

  Beyond the horror and dejection, how did I react to Marc’s death? With a sort of surprise? He had led, on his special terms, an organized and exemplary life and was critical of those who hadn’t. With me he was avuncular, and vaguely protective esthetically and hygienically: Don’t listen to too much Ravel; be sure to do this or that after sex with strangers. This grown-up, this model—how could he have … well, allowed himself to be murdered? And in midstream. His opera was definitely scheduled for the Met (although Bing is said to have asked, Were Sacco and Vanzetti lovers, like Romeo and Juliet?). Again the diary:

  27 January 1964. Except for Bill Flanagan, whom I see every day, Marc was the only composer I frequented as a composer, someone to compare notes with. When we’d finish a piece we’d show it to each other, as in student days, hoping for praise, getting practical suggestions. Our language, on the face of it, would seem to be the same (diatonic, lyric, simple). In fact, we barked up very different trees. Marc was nothing if not theatrical, and precisely for that he showed me how the element of theater was integral even to remote forms like recital songs.

  Malamud is an author with whose subject matter (Jewish poverty in Brooklyn) I’d seem to have little in common, but with whose Assistant I identified wholly. It’s discouraging to realize that Marc’s best work was his last, Idiots First, which he played me just weeks ago. Malamud would have continued to be his ideal collaborator.

  My charm, if I have any, is economized for occasion. Marc’s was squandered freely. When as a Juilliard student I first knocked on his door for an interview, Marc Blitzstein received me with a—a sort of Catholic Impatience, worn like a cloak, as he sat at his piano criticizing Cocteau for being fashionable. Have been going through my diary of that period, which talks of the slush in the gutters, Marc’s postwar indignations, etc.…

  I’ve always felt it, of course, but more and more I’ve come actually to see that happiness not only precedes but accompanies
calamity.

  I have just listened, without intermission, to the new CD of Regina, all 153 minutes of it. Here are some notes taken during that experience:

  I am not a reviewer, I am a composer and a sometime critic; but I do read reviews and see how they shouldn’t be done. (Is the reviewer’s description of a new work, for example, succinct enough to show whether he likes it without his saying “I like it”? Does he describe the work, or the performance of the work?)

  Much has been made about Lillian Hellman’s continual interference—how she forbade Blitzstein’s numerous embellishments on her play. Playwrights, if still alive, can be a thorn in their composer’s side (so goes the received opinion); why don’t they just shut up, the play will survive on its own, and a composer’s domain is a separate dimension. During the lifetimes of Blitzstein and Hellman the opera was never produced as the composer envisioned it. Am I a minority of one in believing Hellman was right about the musicalizing of her play? This first complete version proves that more is less.

  When Poulenc expands Bernanos’s Dialogues des Carmélites, from a filmscript made on Gertrud von Le Fort’s German novella the text stays intact, though with an overlay of five ritual numbers from Latin liturgy. Four of these serve as prayers-without-action to close scenes; the fifth, the final Salve Regina, impels the action when, with each crunch of the guillotine, the music modulates upward, thinning out bit by bit, until all sixteen nuns are dead. These interpolations do not “open up” the story; they intensify a basically motionless drama by entering, as only music can, the mute interior of monastic life. The play is tightened into a necessary opera, there is something to sing about.

  When Blitzstein expands a densely plotted story about “the little foxes that spoil the vines,” the text is widely revised, and with the addition of jazz bands, Negro spirituals, party music, “set” numbers on his own doggerel. The play is loosened into an unnecessary extravagance, because otherwise there would be nothing to sing about. True, certain non-Hellman parts of the piece—such as the “Rain Quartet” and the terrific Dance Suite in Act II—make arguably the best music in Regina, just as the Latin choral numbers are the most beautiful parts of Dialogues; but where these are extraneous those are integral. Whatever else Hellman’s play might be, it’s economical: the power of her craft lies in the claustrophobia of greed, her principal characters are hopelessly naughty and unpoetic. Even without the composer’s accessories, it’s questionable whether any opera can depict unalleviated evil. Music, the most ambiguous of the seven arts, lends sympathy to aberration. Are not Scarpia, Iago, and Claggart, as repainted by Puccini, Verdi, and Britten, raised from mere loathsomeness to a sort of tragic pathos? To hear Regina Giddens and her relatives at song is to defang them, our vines still have tender grapes, and gone is the hard compulsory shell of Hellman.

  Add to this that Regina is Blitzstein’s only large work not designed around his own singing voice, using instead the tessituras of operatic professionals as Porgy and Bess uses them, and you have a watery version of the grandiose. Indeed, the tunes and texture are often pure Porgy, but without the seductive guile of Gershwin’s melody. Nor does Marc, with his frequent spoken interpolations, solve the unsolvable puzzle of how to set pedestrian matters to music. The all-northern cast has great fun whooping it up with southern accents, but their bite is diffused, wilting. Nor can I seize the sense of some of Marc’s text (what does the much-repeated “Naught’s a naught” mean?), while I cringe at the rhymes (“Greedy girl, what a greedy girl,/Got a greedy guiding star./For a little girl, what a greedy girl you are”), and at the anachronisms (“A bang-up party, and quaint withal,/to call the Hub-bards the honored guests at their own ball”).

  This said, something in the sound grows occasionally touching, echoing a far past, as Monteverdi and Puccini echoed too, except that this past of Marc’s is mine too. It is easy to dub him the poor man’s Kurt Weill in his Common Man works; here lies no trace of Weill, but Copland rather, laced with Kern, insolently corny and gorgeously scored. Nor can I deny that I pillaged boldly Birdie’s grand lament about the old homestead, Lionnet, for an aria in my own Miss Julie. The recurrent “dying fall” of a minor third, rising higher and higher, I owe utterly to Marc.

  And I owe to him the recurrent motif (also a drooping minor third, this time fast and nasty) in my 1958 orchestral poem, Eagles, fliched from his orchestral poem, Lear, of the previous year. But this borrowing is of a device (Strauss used it too, in Salomé), not an esthetic. For Marc did not even superficially influence me.

  Which is a good point from which to recapitulate about Marc with some leftover notes:

  Lenny Bernstein would never have been quite what he was without the firm example of Marc Blitzstein, yet there’s nothing Marc did that Lenny didn’t do better. A like analogy may be drawn between what the giant developer, Aaron Copland, borrowed (and glorified) from the midget pioneer, Virgil Thomson—or between Britten and Holst, Debussy and Rebikov, Wagner and Spohr. The greatest masters are not the greatest innovators. Marc Blitzstein, oddly, was not even an innovator, except geographically: what Weill stood for in Germany, Marc stood for in America: the sophisticated soi-disant spokesman of the people. His biggest hit was the arrangement of Weill’s “Mack the Knife” which infiltrated even The Fantasticks.

  Marc, the populist, hung out with aristocrats; Poulenc, the aristocrat, hung out with bartenders.

  Good reviews don’t make me feel as good as bad reviews make me feel bad, but no reviews are worst of all. This sentiment, which all artists feel (don’t they?), was rejected haughtily by Marc. Yet in 1955 when Reuben Reuben (on that hopeless subject: lack of communication) was so roundly loathed by the tryout audiences that they spat upon him, Marc was reduced to tears. Out of context I recall the songs, as he sang them to me, through my own tears. Indeed, so moved was I by the composer’s wheezy intoning of “The Very Moment of Love,” meant for a chorus in an insane asylum, that he copied it out in my little autograph album which lies before me now. That song, like the songs in Marian’s Book, like the “Letter to Emily” in Airborne, like Birdie’s aria—they stick in the mind.

  Yet I am not a fan. I state this advisedly, knowing most of the music pretty well, and giving the man—because he was a friend—the benefit of the doubt (a benefit not accorded to, say, Glass or Carter). Of the fifty-odd essays I’ve written over the decades about twentieth-century matters musical, just one—about Virgil Thomson—has been a harsh reaction to the work of a friend. We both lived to rue this. In 1972, after thirty years of mutely despising Thomson’s music, and figuring that he as a major critic who dished it out regularly wouldn’t mind a taste of his own medicine, I presumed finally to voice my feelings in print. Virgil was not thrilled. When he deigned to speak to me five years later, I vowed never again to weaken a friendship by attacking the vital organs. (Contrary to some opinions, it is not pleasant to write unpleasant reviews.) In retrospect, probably it was better for my soul to have said my say and be remorseful than to have stayed mute and be regretful.

  With Marc my ambivalence is by definition removed. I loved the man and hated much of the music, hated the man and loved much of the music. He can’t defend himself today, but the music can. That music can shout me down. Still, I can live without it. For artistic if not for moral reasons I am unable to discuss it persuasively, and thus should not perhaps have penned these pages. It’s too soon to know if my soul is the better for it.

  Great events do not impel great works, but they do alter method and certainly attitude.

  Paul Goodman when his son died, stopped.

  Samuel Barber when his second huge opera failed, stopped too.

  Marc Blitzstein, frantic about his past operatic failures, and drunk with doubt about the wall of impending work, stopped as well, before the fact.

  21. Ned’s Diary (III)

  You’re too old to understand.

  Yes, but I’ve been young while you’ve never been old. Anyone can be young, you just have to get bor
n; but to be old is an accomplishment of sorts—of patience, if nothing else. The old are just as dumb as the young, but slightly cannier, which is why they get the young to fight their wars.

  When JH asked me last night if I’d ever had a close male friend who was straight (recalling Copland and Harold Clurman), I realized that the question had never occurred to me. No, I guess not. Though in the old days, when we all saw each other socially every day, many of my male friends were straight—Eugene, Seymour, the husbands of girlfriends.

  Are you too young to understand?

  The diary of then, with its endless blather about loneliness and liquor, is no worse written than this now, and paints the scene better than “I” could. Samples:

  1946

  Town Hall with Morris to see (hear) Wanda Landowska. The curtains are half-drawn toward the center, leaving an intimate frame for the harpsichord, the lighted lamp beside it and the Louis XV chair upon which lie seven golden cushions. Landowska enters like a crippled crow, each step measured to last five seconds, and, leering hypnotically at the audience lest they stop clapping, takes a full ninety seconds to reach the chair. She sits down. Then immediately gets up, removes the top cushion and throws it on the floor. Then sits again. In slow motion she extends her right claw toward the keyboard, suspends it for a moment, then withdraws it into her lap. And turns toward us. “Last night,” she announces, “Bach came to me and presented the fingerings and registrations of each of his pieces which you will hear tonight. My labors have borne fruit.” (Shades of Rosalyn Tureck’s first words to the great lady: “We have something in common; we both play Bach.” “Yes,” answered Landowska, “you in your way, and I in his.”) She begins to play. Her introductory speech would have been a pretentious camp had she not delivered the goods. But every minor nuance is the atom of a major scope, while the digital prowess is in such service to the composer, that, yes, we hear Bach speaking.